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Home » How the Senate amnesty bill's border commission will be bogus (path to citizenship, Americas Voice)

How the Senate amnesty bill's border commission will be bogus (path to citizenship, Americas Voice)

Posted Mon, Jan 1, 2013 at 11:47 am

The Gang of Eight Senate amnesty plan includes a "commission" that would decide when the border is secure. After they decide it's secure, the former illegal aliens covered by amnesty would be put on the path to citizenship.

And - showing how little trust you can put in any amnesty supporter - key players are working to undermine the commission and make it a rubberstamp.

The fate of immigration reform, then, largely rests on what this commission looks like, who is on it, and what metric it uses to decide when the border is secure. At first glance, doesn’t this basically constitute giving people like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer veto power over when the citizenship process begins? Many immigration advocates argue the border is already secure, but Republicans continue to insist it isn’t, raising the question of whether this commission will ever acknowledge that border security has been achieved. And if this “commission” doesn’t ever decide the border is secure, couldn’t that result in 11 million people being stranded in second-class legal limbo?

That’s a legitimate worry, according to Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a group advocating for immigration reform. But he tells me that on a conference call yesterday, Democratic Senators reassured immigration advocates that this commission won’t be constructed in a way that will hold up the process for too long.

As Sharry put it, Democrats realize that they can’t “allow the commission to have a real veto” over setting in motion the path to citizenship. He noted that Dems see the commission as “something that gives the Republicans a talking point” to claim they are prioritizing tough enforcement, giving themselves cover to back a process that “won’t stop people from getting citizenship.” However, Sharry added: “The details of this are going to matter hugely, and we’ll have to fight like hell on the individual provisions.”